Chapter 67: The Girl Who Wanted the Bigger Stage
The funicular climbed the steep slope of Mount Mtatsminda in near silence, a smooth, mechanical ascent through darkness punctuated by the occasional orange glow of a streetlamp. Inside the carriage, Izolda pressed her forehead against the cool glass, watching the city of Tbilisi unfurl beneath her like a spilled jewel box. Lights trembled in the damp April air, scattering across the black mirror of the river, mapping constellations across the urban valley. She’d texted Vaso she was studying at a friend’s. He’d read it and not replied, which was its own kind of permission—a silent acknowledgment that she existed in spaces he currently couldn’t be bothered to patrol.
Varek had said to meet at the top, by the old Ferris wheel. It was closed, skeletal against the navy sky, its empty gondolas swinging slightly in the mountain breeze.
She found him leaning against the safety fence, a dark silhouette looking out, not down. He didn’t turn as her boots crunched on the gravel path.
“It never looks real from up here, does it?” she said, coming to stand beside him, the city a breathtaking diorama below. “It looks like a model. Like you could reach down and pluck a building out.”
“That’s the point of vistas,” Varek replied, his voice calm in the crisp air. “They create the illusion of scale. Make you feel like you’re outside the system, just observing. It’s a lie, of course. You’re always inside it. You’re just in a quieter corner.”
She hugged her jacket tighter. The wind up here had teeth. “You didn’t bring me up here for the view.”
“No.” He finally turned to look at her. The ambient light from a distant snack bar played across his face, sharpening his features. “I brought you up here because there’s no one to perform for. No university peers whispering. No Vaso measuring your reactions. Just the wind and a man who doesn’t care about your smile unless it’s honest. So let’s be honest.”
He shifted, resting his elbows on the fence behind him, a posture of casual inquisition.
“If I could guarantee you something—something vast, something that would make you the undeniable choice, the one everyone remembers—would you do something for me? Anything I say. The moment I say it. No questions, no hesitation, no considering how it looks. Just action.”
Izolda laughed, a bright, practiced sound that cracked in the middle, swallowed by the vastness around them. “Anything? That’s a dangerous thing to offer a stranger.”
“I’m not a stranger. I’m the man who can give you an exit. And you didn’t answer. You performed.”
The correction was gentle, absolute. It stripped the laughter from her lips. She stared at him, the playful mask dissolving into something younger, more uncertain. He wasn’t flirting. This wasn’t a game. This was an interview for a role she hadn’t even read the script for.
Her eyes flicked back to the city, to the tiny, glowing grid that contained her whole life: the lecture halls where she was admired but not respected, the cafes where Vaso’s presence turned her into an accessory, the suffocating expectation to be luminous, forever and effortlessly, for an audience that felt smaller and more demanding every day. Being chosen by someone like Varek, for something he implied was larger than parties or diplomas or a wealthy boyfriend’s approval… it wasn’t about obedience. It was about being thrown a rope.
“Yes,” she said. The word was quiet, stripped bare. “I would. Not because I’m obedient. Because I’m bored. And I’m tired of being watched by people too small to matter.”
Varek nodded, as if she’d stated a simple fact like the temperature. He pushed off the fence and took a few steps along the gravel path, toward the silent Ferris wheel.
“Good. Now, a practical question. You have rivals. Everyone does. Two, in the context of this… opportunity. Madona. Or Makvala. If you could remove one—cleanly, finally—which thread do you cut?”
Izolda followed him, her hands buried in her pockets. The choice seemed absurd at first. Madona, her mother’s age, polished and anxious. Makvala, all provocative laughter and sly comments. Then she thought of Madona’s eyes on her at the gallery opening last month. It wasn’t envy, exactly. It was a cold, taxonomic assessment. A dissection. She’d looked at Izolda’s laugh, her dress, the way Vaso held her arm, and had categorized it all as ‘pretty mistake.’ There was a judgment there that was icier than Makvala’s teasing. Madona feared what Izolda represented—the passing of time, the shift in attention, the unthinking power of youth—and that fear made her dangerous. She wasn’t a player; she was a critic with a vested interest in the review.
Makvala just wanted to play.
“Madona,” Izolda said, the name leaving her lips with a faint cloud of condensation. “Makvala plays games. She’s annoying, but it’s a sport. Madona… she judges me. She looks at me like I’m a symptom of her own decline. A pretty mistake she’s too polite to point out, but she’s counting all the ways it will go wrong. I can feel her waiting for me to falter. It’s in the way she smiles when Vaso isn’t looking at me.”
Varek stopped walking. They were under the shadow of the Ferris wheel now, its huge, motionless outline a cage against the sky. He turned, his face in deeper shadow.
“Interesting,” he murmured, almost to himself. “Otar chooses Vaso. Besarion chooses Vaso. Madona chooses you. And you choose Madona.” He let out a soft, soundless breath that wasn’t quite a laugh. “The geometry is almost perfect.”
Izolda’s breath caught. Otar chooses Vaso. The meek boy with the crush. Of course he did. Besarion chooses Vaso. That made a brutal sense. Madona chooses you. A cold slit of fear opened in her stomach. She was a target on someone else’s board, and she hadn’t even known she was playing.
“What geometry?” she asked, her voice barely a whisper.
Varek ignored the question. He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a small, sleek metallic case—a data drive. He held it out to her.
“Your first instruction. No questions. Tomorrow, between your second and third lectures, you will go to the central university library. You will use the public terminal in the reference section—the one in the far corner, past the geology stacks. You will insert this. You will type in the nine-digit code that I will text you at 10:05 AM exactly. You will then press ‘execute.’ You will wait fifteen seconds. You will remove the drive. You will leave. You will not look at what is on the screen. You will not speak to anyone on your way in or out. Can you do that?”
She looked at the drive in his gloved hand. It looked insignificant. Like a piece of fallen star. It felt heavier than the mountain they stood on.
“What does it do?” The question was out before she could stop it.
“That’s a question,” he said, his hand still extended. The drive glinted. “The instruction stands. Can you do it? Yes or no.”
The wind moaned through the struts of the Ferris wheel. The city lights trembled below, tiny and silent. She thought of being chosen. She thought of escape. She thought of Madona’s cold, waiting eyes.
Her fingers, cold and trembling, closed around the drive. It was warm from his pocket.
“Yes,” she said.
He released it. His hand dropped back to his side. “Good. Go home, Izolda. The funicular’s last car is in twenty minutes. Get some sleep. Tomorrow, you stop being a pretty mistake. You become a cause.”
He turned and walked away from the wheel, vanishing down a darker path that led toward the observatory, swallowed by the night.
Izolda stood frozen, the metal drive a burning brand in her clenched fist. She looked out at the city, but the illusion was broken. It didn’t look like a model anymore. It looked like a circuit board, vast and intricate, and she was just holding a piece of it, unsure if she was a component or a spark about to set the whole thing ablaze.
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The chill that had seeped into Besarion’s bones at Rike Park seemed to have settled over the entire city. It was a damp, clinging cold that worked its way through layers of wool and leather, finding the seams. Izolda felt it as she walked, her arms wrapped around herself, the cheerful facade she’d worn at the university café already crumbling. Vaso’s last text glowed in her mind: Don’t wait up. Business. It wasn’t the absence that scraped at her; it was the utter lack of need to explain. She was an appointment he could cancel.
When Varek’s car, a silent, dark electric sedan, had pulled up beside her as she aimlessly turned down a side street near the Dry Bridge market, it felt less like a coincidence and more like a vacuum being filled. He’d rolled down the passenger window, no greeting, just a calm, assessing look. “Get in. You’re cold.”
She hadn’t hesitated. The interior was warm and smelled of clean leather and something else, a faint, sharp scent like ozone or old books. He didn’t ask where she wanted to go. He simply drove, weaving through the evening traffic with a quiet certainty that removed the burden of choice from her. She stared out at the blur of neon and ancient stone, her reflection a ghost over the city. He’d seen her, truly seen her, in the square days ago. He’d looked past the laughter and the easy smile and had named the hungry void behind it. No one did that. Vaso only saw the surface, because the surface was what he owned.
They didn’t go to a bar or a restaurant. The car slid into the underground garage of a modern, discreet hotel near Avlabari. He led her to a private elevator that required a keycard. The silence between them was thick, charged not with awkwardness but with a potent, unspoken transaction. The elevator opened directly into a suite. It was all muted grays and clean lines, floor-to-ceiling windows presenting a breathtaking, indifferent panorama of the lit river and the distant fortress. It felt like a spaceship hovering above the city’s messy, emotional life.
Varek walked to the center of the room, shrugged off his coat, and let it fall onto a low sofa. He turned to face her, his hands going to the buttons of his shirt.
“Your first test starts here,” he said, his voice flat, instructional. The soft, persuasive charm was gone, stripped away. What remained was a stark, unsettling clarity.
Izolda stood frozen near the door, the immense view at her back. Her heart was a frantic bird in her chest. This was it. The point of divergence. The dangerous offering.
He undressed methodically, without theatricality. Shirt, trousers, underwear. His body was lean, defined, the body of a man who maintained his instrument with detached discipline. There was no shyness, no invitation. It was a statement of fact. He stood naked before her, and his gaze was as assessing as it had been through the car window.
“I want you to be my little whore.”
The word hung in the sterile, temperature-controlled air. It wasn’t spat with contempt. It was delivered with the precision of a surgeon naming a body part. Clinical. Defining.
Her breath hitched. A hot-cold flush raced over her skin. This wasn’t the whispered filth of a drunk boyfriend in the dark. This was a job description.
He continued, his mercury eyes locked on hers. “I want to fuck you hard. First, I dominate you. Then, you dominate me.” A slight tilt of his head. “So, would you be my little whore?”
The question was a blade held to the thin membrane of her identity. All her life, she had been the luminous object, the coveted prize, the center of attention that demanded no responsibility. To be a whore was to be a tool, a means to an end, a function. It was to relinquish the precious, exhausting burden of being Izolda. The terror was immense. The relief was catastrophic.
She didn’t speak. Her fingers, gone numb, fumbled with the buttons of her blouse. Then the zipper of her jeans. She let her clothes fall to the polished concrete floor in small, sad piles. The air was cool on her bare skin. She felt utterly exposed, not just physically, but existentially. The girl everyone watched was stepping out of her own silhouette.
“Yes,” she whispered, the word soundless.
He heard it. He closed the distance between them in three silent strides. His hands weren’t gentle. They mapped her, possessing not with passion but with intent. A palm cupped her breast, thumb roughly circling her nipple until it peaked into a tight, sensitive bud. His other hand slid between her legs, fingers pushing into her without preamble. She gasped, her head falling back.
“Not wet for me yet,” he observed, his breath near her ear. “That’s fear. We’ll use that.” He worked his fingers inside her, a blunt, stretching intrusion. “You’re going to get wet thinking about how much of a cheap little cunt you are for a stranger. For a man who doesn’t even pretend to love you.”
The obscenity was a spark on tinder. Shame ignited, but it burned with a strange, dark heat. A whimper escaped her lips, and she felt a traitorous slickness begin to answer his cruel, knowing touch.
He withdrew his fingers, grabbed a handful of her hair at the crown of her head, and pulled her towards the large, low platform of the bed. “On your knees. Face the window. I want you to watch the city while you take it.”
She obeyed, the cool linen of the duvet cover under her knees. Her own reflection, pale and wide-eyed, stared back from the dark glass, superimposed over the glittering web of lights below. He positioned himself behind her. She heard the tear of a foil packet, the brief, efficient sounds of preparation. Then the broad, insistent pressure of his cockhead at her entrance.
He didn’t ask if she was ready. He drove into her with one deep, merciless stroke, seating himself to the hilt.
The cry that tore from her throat was raw, ripped from a place deeper than pain. He was large, and the sudden fullness was a shock that bordered on violence. He held himself there, buried inside her, his hands gripping her hips hard enough to bruise.
“This is what you are now,” he said, his voice low and even against the shell of her ear. “A hole. My hole. Say it.”
Tears blurred the city lights. “I’m your hole,” she choked out.
“Good whore.”
He began to move. It was a brutal, pounding rhythm, each thrust a punctuating claim. The bed rocked against the wall with a dull, rhythmic thud. The physical sensation was overwhelming—a rough, dragging friction that sparked into sharp peaks of sensation, each crash of his hips sending a jolt through her core. He used her body with a focused, impersonal intensity, one hand fisted in her hair again, pulling her head back to arch her spine.
“You take this cock better than you take your pretty-boy’s, don’t you?” he grunted, his pace relentless. “His is a toy. This is a fucking tool. Tell me.”
“Y-yes,” she stammered, the words punched out of her with each drive. “Yours is… it’s better. I’m your whore.”
“You are. Come on my cock. Do it.”
The command, the degradation, the sheer physical force coalesced into a terrifying wave. It crashed over her without warning, a climax that felt less like pleasure and more like a system failure—a sharp, constricting series of spasms that milked his shaft as he fucked her through it. She sobbed, her body convulsing, her forehead pressed against the cold window.
He didn’t stop. He fucked her through the aftershocks, his breathing growing rougher. “Gonna fill this used little cunt up,” he growled, his control fraying at the edges. The thrusts became shorter, harder, more frantic. With a final, deep grind and a low, guttural sound that was nothing like a moan, he spent himself inside her, the heat of his release a shocking contrast to the cold glass against her skin.
He stayed there for a moment, slumped over her back, both of them slick with sweat, breathing ragged in the quiet room. Then he pulled out. The loss of him felt abrupt, leaving her feeling hollowed and empty.